Some Don’t Want Your Opinion

Social Media consultants and public relations professionals will all tell you one key thing of being involved in social media; be sure to engage if you’re blogging as a company. Allow comments, yes, moderate, but engage. But some don’t or wont. We took a look at who’s blogging but doesn’t really want to allow comments.

We were rather intrigued by the results. We examined 500 corporate blogs and found that 94% of them allow comments and of that 94%, 90% moderated the comments. We then looked to provincial and state governments and found 87% out of 105 blogs allowed comments and 95% of those moderated the comments.

We then looked at the non-profit sector and stumbled across the online sector of Cyburbia least likely to allow comments, even moderated ones…our research lead us to religious groups. Those who could be defined as more “extreme” in either the Christian, Islamic or other religions 98.5% of the time did not allow commenting at all – 600 blogs were analyzed. As religious groups moved more to the centre, we found 73% allowed moderated comments and 6% allowed comments without moderation. We’ll let you put your own interpretation to that.

But in summary we can conclude that businesses generally are looking to engage their audience and are more open. Religious groups that are more moderate will be more open to discussion and contrary opinions but those that are more conservative are more interested in pushing a message and less likely to want to hear contrary opinions. NGO’s and NPO’s also will engage with their audiences.

(Author: G. Crouch)